Ever wondered what the best Euro Game is? Which publisher makes the best Meeples? Or what Jon’s favourite cheese is?

On
Saturday the 10th March 2018, the Polyhedron Collider team will be at
Airecon in Harrogate, and at 4:30 pm in the King’s Suite we will be
joined by a host of bloggers, vloggers and ploggers* for On the Couch
with Polyhedron Collider. We will be joined by Efka and Elaine from No
Pun Included, Paul Grogan from Gaming Rules and many others including
the Game Pit and Unlucky Frog Gaming podcasts and we want your help.

Welcome to February, the Tuesday of the year (as Andy calls it) as the Polyhedron Collider team recount their adventures from the City of Games convention. We talk about mega Kickstarter Nemesis, melting Jon’s brain with Viticulture and Alchemists, getting down to some family games with Number 9 and eating poisoned chocolates.

I was going to start this review by saying that Arkon is a bit like Ronseal, and then I realised that not everyone in the world will be familiar with a wood staining product and its advertising slogan. For those who haven't got a nostalgic history of UK television commercials, Ronseal's slogan was "it does what is says on the tin" and I feel that by describing Arkon as a take-that card game with set collection and bidding, you more or less know most of what you need to about the game, but we have been tasked with reviewing this product and so we are honour bound to tell you more.

Any Grammar Nazi out there will happily tell you...sorry, tell you happily... that Star Trek’s famous line “To Boldy Go..” should in fact read “To Go, Boldly…” as one should never split one’s infinitives. It can be a tad painful.

We finally arrive at our third and final part of our 2018 preview, and this has been without a doubt the most difficult part of the list to put together. I have taken input from all three members of the Polyhedron Collider team and our highlights were featured in our most recent Podcast episode. It has become apparent however just how much of a hype generating machine Kickstarter has become. I've managed to put a list of over 20 games that Kickstarter is bringing to us this year, but I have struggled to find just 10 games arriving via more conventional publishing means. Is this because publishers are being more guarded with their announcements or is this because of the meteoric rise of Kickstarter?

The Polyhedron Collider boys return to their normal podcast format, venturing into the wasteland of Fallout from Fantasy Flight Games, trying to be the next Gordon Ramsay with Kitchen Rush from Artipia Games and and conquer fantasy lands with Ethnos from CMON. With a little help from the mailbag we discuss Andy's acquisition disorder, the value of games and just how much are game collection is worth.

It would appear that we at Polyhedron Collider are a shower of dirty liars and hypocrites. "What is the reason for this confession?" you may ask. It seems that we may have made the statement on an earlier podcast that “it’s not all about the bling”. Whilst true, my track record on this sort of thing isn’t exactly exemplary as I’ve got a growing number of games in my collection with more shinies than Malcolm Reynolds after having Serenity diamond-encrusted - one of which is Empires: Age of Discovery, a hefty Worker Placement/Area Control game from Eagle-Gryphon.

I’ve been following the development of Nemesis quite closely over the last couple of years. I first spoke to the game’s designer Adam Kwapiński way back in 2015 at Essen, when he explained the concept of a game he was developing where players wake from hyper-sleep to find their ship floating adrift in the celestial void and infested by slime covered aliens. I was hooked.